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Overview
Overview
The emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences, as revealed through images in scientific atlases--a story of how lofty epistemic ideals fuse with workaday practices.
Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences--and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images.
From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences--from anatomy to crystallography--are those featured in scientific atlases, the compendia that teach practitioners what is worth looking at and how to look at it. Galison and Daston use atlas images to uncover a hidden history of scientific objectivity and its rivals. Whether an atlas maker idealizes an image to capture the essentials in the name of truth-to-nature or refuses to erase even the most incidental detail in the name of objectivity or highlights patterns in the name of trained judgment is a decision enforced by an ethos as well as by an epistemology.
As Daston and Galison argue, atlases shape the subjects as well as the objects of science. To pursue objectivity--or truth-to-nature or trained judgment--is simultaneously to cultivate a distinctive scientific self wherein knowing and knower converge. Moreover, the very point at which they visibly converge is in the very act of seeing not as a separate individual but as a member of a particular scientific community. Embedded in the atlas image, therefore, are the traces of consequential choices about knowledge, persona, and collective sight. Objectivity is a book addressed to anyone interested in the elusive and crucial notion of objectivity--and in what it means to peer into the world scientifically.
- Format: TradePaperback
- Author: Daston, Lorraine
- ISBN: 9781890951795
- Condition: Used
- Dimensions: 9.00 x 1.70
- Number Of Pages: 504
- Publication Year: 2010
Language:
English
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Read the Difficult Things
Erik G. - 5 years agoA fantastic book that delves into a topic I would categorize as common sense. Common sense in that we take objectivity, use it, and think of it as a concept that is so self-explanatory that it gives off a sense of permanence. A permanence into the future and stretching back all through the past. The idea that objectivity could have a history, and as an idea have a birth I find to be something truly important. It is something that I believe to be important in an understanding of the world and history, or perhaps more specific to human psychology and idea synthesis. Common sense in this current year is the accumulation of all of time that has preceded it. Time spent wrestling with trying to wrap our minds around reality and how best to traverse through it by being able to call out all of its aspects by name. And how sometimes in that search we believe that an idea usurps a previous one, only to realize that both are accurate, applicable, true even, depending on context. The search will only end when we have walked every step through our limitations, and continue when we find ways around them. The point is always moving as long as movement is viewed as currently is, and the chase will always continue. Perhaps another insight is that everything is always the same, but only the rules of word and logic around it change. Changing the angle and/or lens from which it is viewed. Regardless this book is a staple in the taxonomy of foundational ideas. In my opinion of course.
HPB Staff Review